Assassin’s Screed Bloodlines
Welcome back, Assassins, this time we’re going to be taking a look at the forgotten — or barely even known about — Playstation Portable spin off of the series. Is this a hidden gem looked over because of poor marketing? Does it add anything to the overarching story and world of the series? What kind of themes and ideas does it bring to the table? Come with me as I play through Assassin’s Creed Bloodlines and let’s find out.
Most people, even fans of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, are probably not even aware of Bloodlines, the 2009 handheld spin off. It’s the kind of game that I only know about myself because I look everything up on both Wikipedia and series fan wikis. Released the same day as Assassin’s Creed II, the game had connectivity with the main series title, which as mentioned in the last episode is the only place Maria Thorpe actually gets a last name. (Assuming you do actually you connect the two.)
Bloodlines isn’t even the only major (that is, not mobile or Facebook) spin off game in the series. The most popular of the spin-offs is Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, featuring a mixed race female protagonist — two whole years before Ubisoft told us female assassins were just too time consuming to manage in Unity. Despite being titled Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, Aveline de Grandpre’s story doesn’t really have anything to do with Connor’s save for one little crossover. Black Flag would also get a single player DLC stand alone in the form of Freedom Cry, starring Jackdaw quartermaster, and former slave, Adawale on his own adventure.
There was also a prequel!!!! Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles. It was released in 2008 on Nintendo DS, the iPod Touch/iPhone 4, Symbian Mobile, Windows Phone 7, and Sony Ericsson Xperia Play. God, what a world we used to live in. Now it’s just Apple or Android.
Altair’s Chronicles takes place in 1190, the year before the original game, and Altair has to find keys to open a magic temple and somehow he knows about the Templars even though he seemed pretty unfamiliar with them in the first game and he meets a lot of people who are never seen or mentioned again, and nothing that happens is ever referred to in the novelization of Altair’s life, despite the game featuring his first girlfriend who died tragically because she was a McGuffin.
I’m really just skimming over the AssassinsCreedWiki page for the game. Since DS emulators are kind of annoying to deal with and the game looks like ass, don’t expect me to give a serious look back at Altair’s Chronicles. Or the mobile phone version of the original Assassin’s Creed that looks like a GBA game, which is a thing that exists.
Not to be outdone, Ezio of course also got a spin off game, which keeps his story in the lead as having the most spin offs. Assassin’s Creed II: Discovery takes place in between the two DLC missions, and is another DS game, so I’m not going to bother with it.
I also won’t be playing the defunct iOS game Assassin’s Creed Memories, which was some kind of iPhone card game that closed down in 2015.
I won’t be playing through the equally defunct Facebook busywork game Assassin’s Creed Project Legacy, which isn’t even available anymore, but had a ton of worldbuilding and story stuff that doesn’t show up anywhere else, like the story of Lucrezia Borgia’s illegitimate Assassin son, a storyline that introduces plot elements that I think become pretty major in Syndicate.
Regardless of how much information Project Legacy gives about how the Shroud of Turin is from ancient aliens, it was taken off Facebook in 2013 after not meeting the TOS.
Adding to the pile of “games that don’t technically exist anymore” is Assassin’s Creed Pirates.
While “One Piece but Assassin’s Creed” does look kind of pretty, and I did enjoy the naval battles of Black Flag, I’m not going to bother combing the internet for an apk file, since it’s been removed from Google Play.
It also doesn’t seem like it’d be the kind of game that’s actually enjoyable to play through.
I’m also not going to play through Assassin’s Creed Recollections or…
good lord how many of these damned mobile games are there? Half of them don’t even exist anymore. I’ve literally never heard of Assassin’s Creed Identity, the smartphone RPG where you get to create your own Assassin in the Renaissance setting they’ve been milking forever and yet it is right now, today, the #3 top paid game in the Google Play store, but I don’t want to spend two dollars on a game that I’m going to hate and is probably riddled with microtransactions except that it actually looks pretty good?
Ugh, I feel like I’m having an aneurysm here, how are there so many of these spin off games, how are so many of them no longer available, and how is one of them that I’ve never heard of still so popular?
Deep breaths…
I’m also not going to play Assassin’s Creed Rebellion, the recently released game that features Aguilar and Maria from the terrible 2016 Assassin’s Creed film that nobody even liked, any more than I already have, because a month of Marvel S.T.R.I.K.E. Force was enough to turn me off of gacha games.
Even if the Rebellion assassins are cute little big headed babies that I just want to put on my shelf instead of the hideous dead eyed Funko Pops everyone collects.
What I am going to play is Bloodlines (obviously), along with Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD, which is the remastered version of the handheld title.
I’m not going to bother with more PSP emulators, but I do want to talk about the stabby ninja Rihanna, because her story has some interesting things to say, even if some of that would just be repeating what Chris Franklin of Errant signal already said.
Even though it was released as a standalone, Freedom Cry and the non-standalone Aveline are both DLC for Assassin’s Creed VI: Black Flag, so I’ll get to those when the time comes.
Assassin’s Creed Rogue is actually considered a main series title, but it was released for the last console cycle and on the same day as Unity and doesn’t really seem to have gotten much attention until it’s remaster earlier this year
(2018, at least assuming I get this up in the last few days of December). So I’ll definitely be playing that one, and seeing what it adds to the LORE by being set from a Templar traitor’s perspective.
There are also the Assassin’s Creed Chronicles games, which are three short sidescrolling Mark of the Ninja rip offs. I’ll go through China, India, and Russia as I get to them.
And just for completion’s sake, I’ll probably go through the movies. That means Assassin’s Creed Lineage will probably be the next thing I go over. It was a made for TV and Youtube short film released in three parts on SpikeTV. I’m not even sure SpikeTV is still a thing.
There’s a 14 minute bunch of Youtube videos that bridge the gap between Assassin’s Creed II and Brotherhood, but that don’t seem to be meaningful or important, and Assassin’s Creed Embers, which is a very good short about Ezio being old and dying, and introduces Shao Jun the main character of China.
And, yes, I’m going to rewatch that terrible live action movie starring Magneto.
I’m probably not going to go through any of the comics, and while I’d like to listen to audiobooks of the YA novels, they’re not in the library. I hadn’t intended to go over the Oliver Bowden novelizations of the games, but then I started listening to Secret Crusade, and it’s…
Actually pretty good?
So let’s just stick a pin in that one.
But that’s enough of that. Isn’t this supposed to be a look back at a specific game?
The year is 1191, one month after the death of Al Mualim. Altair is now the leader of the Assassins, and the Templars have holed up in the Acre port district under the leadership of Armand Bouchart. Wanting to crush their enemies before they have a chance to regroup, Altair leads a group of Assassins into the Acre port to cut off the head of the organization once again. Unfortunately, the Assassins arrive too late, and Altair climbs the walls of the citadel only to see the ships sailing off into the distance.
Searching the port for clues, the Master of the brotherhood finds a familiar face arguing about being left behind. Maria, on the outs with the Templars after having her life spared by Altair in Jerusalem’s cemetery where she played the part of Robert de Sable’s body double, is being left behind as all the other Templars leave for the island of Cyprus without her. Altair and Maria have a duel — an actual boss fight with a health gauge and everything — and with Maria’s defeat, Altair captures her to find out as much information as he can on why the Templars have moved to Cyprus
Cyprus’ Emperor Isaac Comnenus pissed off King Richard, who captured the island and sold it to the Templars, who now rule it with a cruel fist. When Altair arrives, he finds the Cypriot Resistance as his allies, and learns about an Archive of Templar knowledge and artifacts. But in a new country with few familiar faces, who can Altair trust?
The first thing to note about Bloodlines is that it does away with the framing story. There is no Desmond Miles in this game for us to play as. While it keeps the science fiction user interface elements, the story is simply Altair’s as he seeks out the rest of the Templar organization and attempts to dismantle it once and for all. Spoilers for the entire series including the framing story of the previous game, but he clearly fails.
The second thing to note about bloodlines is just how absolutely ugly it is. I’d forgotten what the Playstation Portable was like. Comparing it to Prince of Persia Rival Swords or something would probably be unfair, since that game’s levels are far smaller than the “open world” of Bloodlines, but even a downgrade to Altair’s rather crisp model and texturing to bump everything else up just a little would have been nice. Character models of enemies look like they’re out of the PS1 era with blurry, anti-aliased textures instead of the blocky pixels of yesteryear.
The gameplay, at least, is exactly what you’d expect. If anything it feels much easier, either that or I’ve gotten a lot better after replaying sections of Assassin’s Creed just to better write about the sequences. I found myself managing to get counter kills easily enough, even if waiting for enemies to attack was still tedious. When they didn’t oblige, it was a lot easier to just wail on them. You can also finally pick up throwing daggers, although it definitely feels like the range on them is a lot shorter. The climbing is the same as before, although with the PSP’s limited processing power, there’s a lot less to climb. Buildings just have little grab ledges at head height, or maybe a window. Tower handholds stand out quite a bit more when the tower is a simply textured sand coloured cylinder, and there are several places that have climbing puzzles that feel like they’re straight out of Prince of Persia, except without all the pole shimmying and wall running that make those puzzles work. Instead it’s just a long, single row of little bricks sticking out of a wall, leading around a corner, and maybe you’ll have to jump across a gap.
The actual freerunning is made quite a bit more difficult by the lack of a camera control stick. The PSP controls have the camera controlled by holding down the Left trigger (which I believe would be lock-on in the previous game, though as I said last time, I had to play using the keyboard only), which turns the PSP’s face buttons into a camera control D-pad. Even jury rigging my Steam Controller so that the right touchpad rotated the camera wasn’t very helpful, since the game locks the camera forward when you’re running, and only lets you turn a few degrees. This means while running around it’s very difficult to see around corners, or even to turn them without stopping first. It’s very frustrating, The actual jumping might be better than the original game, but there were still sections where I found myself bumping into walls and jumping along beams into exactly the wrong path.
There are a few differences, though. The biggest one being that now the Blend action actually will just let you walk through guard posts (sometimes??) because there are no roving bands of scholars outside of a few cutscenes. I actually really like this, because to me the Assassin’s Creed series has never been a traditional stealth series (I mean, this isn’t Metal Gear. You don’t climb under things or hide in boxes, there’s no way to limit your movement to going along a wall) it’s about social stealth. You’re the blade in the crowd. I just wish that blending in with a crowd wasn’t still so damned slow and tedious. The other big change is that Eagle Vision is completely done away with, despite being so integral to the twist at the end of the previous game. Now that the lock on button is needed for controlling the camera, the “Head” button of the Puppeteer system, which Bloodlines still uses, is now a lock on button. It actually works better, if you ask me, since the triangle button otherwise does nothing besides synchronization. The circle button on the other hand goes unused outside of grabbing in combat and dropping from ledges.
Overall, Bloodlines presents a much simpler and easier version of Assassin’s Creed with a rather clunky camera control scheme. The biggest change isn’t mechanical, it’s structural.
Whereas the previous game had you given two or three people to kill and a requirement that you first investigate enough to learn two or three things about them, even if it’s just an effective entrypoint of murder, Bloodlines already ditches that concept for a far more linear experience.
There are side missions to do, discovered by walking around the incredibly small mission areas or by climbing the single tower in each location and synchronizing. Message delivery, murdering random targets, saving citizens from hostile guards, these all make appearances, but now instead of summoning scholars or vigilantes, side missions give you Templar Coins which are used to purchase upgrades like health and damage and more throwing knives (not that it matters, since you can now pick the thrown knives up, even if they miss a target).
Templar Coins can also be found by climbing around the open world sections (with how many of each denomination are in the world being shown on the start screen like a 90s collectathon), and ticking off any of the game’s many, many achievements. Heck, I’m pretty sure I got Templar Coins randomly sometimes. Which means that in the end before even getting to the final DNA sequence I was already fully kitted out with a hundred extra coins left over.
The story to Bloodlines is not very good. Sorry to just come out and say it like that, but it’s true. The game has done away with the investigation sequences and instead simply mentions a new character every few missions and Altair goes off to commit a murder.
Altair goes to Limassol, Cyprus to track down Bouchard, wanting to stop the Templars from using any Pieces of Eden that they might have. He contacts a member of the Resistance, learns of the Templar Archive, and then goes to murder Frederick The Red, the leader of the Templars in Limassol. The Resistance house is burned down while he was out, Bouchard gives a speech about Frederick’s death and institutes martial law. Maria warns Bouchard but he believes she’s a traitor and captures her. Altair captures her back. Bouchard flees to Kyrenia. Altair follows, but the pirates that gave them passage try to turn them in for a reward and Maria flees. She almost gets captured by pirates, but members of the Cypriot Resistance save her. Altair finds Barnabas, the leader of the resistance, who has Altair kill a supposed traitor named Jonas.
Altair goes to commit a murder, learns that a Templar named “The Bull” put a bounty on his and Maria’s head. Barnabas tells Altair that there’s now a riot over Jonas’ death and The Bull will call out Altair and make the Resistance hate him, because they didn’t know Jonas was a “traitor”. Altair goes to murder The Bull, learns nothing about his personality or goals, and then it continues on like that.
Altair does a thing, it gets complicated, someone mentions a new Templar character, Altair goes to murder them, the plot advances. The disappointing part is that there actually are a lot of good ideas, but this is a bland mobile spin-off, so it doesn’t really go anywhere.
Honestly I’m just making a section to go over all of the Templar boss fights not because any of them are actually good or interesting but to highlight how terrible they are compared to the first game’s treatment of the kill list.
He’s in charge of the Templars in Limassol. Also he’s a really mean guy. That’s about it.
He’s a big scary religious guy! He’s really extreme. What does he preach? Who knows. But he’s religious and he has a legion of extreme followers who are all crazy people with wild hair and tattered robes. Altair chokes him to death and he warns that his tyranny will outlive him. This is about as close as the game comes to a memory corridor discussion, but it’s barely even a conversation.
A crazy woman that the Templars keep in the castle jail. She was a noblewoman who was tortured and now she eats people? She likes torturing guards. She gives the Templars information about the Cypriot Resistance. When Altair defeats her he tries to interrogate her, but she’s raving and delusional so he has no choice but to put her out of her misery. Maybe she was the former owner of the castle of Buffavento? Who knows.
The only boss besides Bouchard who gets even a little bit of characterization. At first it seems there’s only one brother, who acts like a drunken lecher in the morning and a decent man preaching the Templar’s mercy and kindness that afternoon. But then when Altair confronts Shalim, it turns out it’s actually Shahar! There’s a double boss fight. That’s about it. No death speeches, no motivations, no higher cause. Shahar tells Maria that the Templars care about order, not liberty, which does confirm for her what Altair has been saying, but he doesn’t muse about how order is more important or justify what he does.
Bouchard has about as much characterization as Frederick “The Red”. He’s just in charge of the Templars now. He doesn’t seem to justify anything, he doesn’t give his motivations, he doesn’t talk about how the Templars are actually the good guys. He kills a man for suggesting that maybe martial law is a bad look. He pretty much calls Maria a whore, and blames her for de Sable’s death.
He calls Altair a credit to his creed and Altair says Bouchard abandoned his, but, like, did he? There isn’t really enough to say whether he did or not, it’s not like authoritarian rule is new to the Templars.
When I wrote the overview of the last game, I agonized about whether or not to include the section on each of the targets. It was long and arduous, and originally that section alone was like one page on each of the targets before I cut it down. I felt like even if it was long, it was important to at least briefly explain each of them, and show that they think they’re doing the right thing, and while they probably aren’t, there are at least good reasons why they thought that way.
In Bloodlines, that’s changed. The characters are just neat boss fights. There are several missions to assassinate pirates, guard captains, and other enemies that you can murder by the dozen. The unique enemies with unique character models are all saved for dramatic set piece boss fights that don’t really work in the Assassin’s Creed gameplay format. They feel like something out of a beat-em-up. It’s all very arcadey, and while 2009 was a long time ago, the progression of events in Bloodlines feels downright ancient.
Bloodlines doesn’t just look like a Playstation game. It’s structured like one as well.
Well, it does. Kind of.
At the end of the game, Altair finds out that Bouchard gave him a distraction to follow and while he was in Kyrenia, all the artifacts of the Templar archive, the thing Altair had been looking for throughout the whole game, had been moved out of Cyprus. He and Bouchard fight in the depths of the now empty archive, and once Armand is defeated the entire structure collapses, out of nowhere, and Altair and Maria run back up the whole thing, jumping around crumbling architecture in Prince of Persia style.
The thing that was ostensibly the whole impetus of the game is just shrugged off. There’s no Templar archive anymore, it’s been moved away. Altair and Maria decide they’ll go to India, and there’s one last bit of Altair writing in his journal about the Apple. Roll credits.
The main quest line is essentially a shaggy dog story. Altair goes to Cyprus to find more Precursor artifacts and it turns out they’ve all been moved out while he was murdering random people. Sad trombone plays.
Beyond that, though, the game really has at least a few plot threads that ultimately go nowhere but are still so much better than the game around them.
Cyprus is an occupied nation. The Templars have actually had a hold on it for generations, long enough to build an archive of knowledge and artifacts, but after Isaac Comnenus pissed off Richard the Lionhearted, they had to buy the island and rule it overtly. Despite Altair’s incredibly odd assertion that the Templars have never been interested in governing before, because I guess he forgot about the entire plot to the last game where they wanted to free the Holy Land by using a magic artifact to rule over it, Bouchard rules the island with a tight fist, causing the people to rebel.
While the game only shows us a handful of members, Cyprus is said to have a resistance force that opposes the rule of Bouchard and the Templars. Most of the little side missions to earn Templar Coins are done to help out resistance members by doing their mail or killing people who irritated them, or saving them from guards. We don’t know what their goals are — do they want to restore Isaac to the throne? Do they want a Cypriot Republic? Do they want the people of Cyprus to function as federated anarchosyndicalist communes? — but we do know the they’re pissed off at the people in charge.
Unfortunately that’s about as far as the game goes. Alexander, Markos, and the fake Barnabas give you names of people to murder and ask you to rescue prisoners, and they keep Maria for a bit, that’s about it.
What is interesting about the existence of the Resistance is just how much better the series would handle the concept in a later game. A lot of the ideas presented in Bloodlines feel like things that would show up again later in Brotherhood. Only in that game you not only get told that a resistance exists, you actively help it grow by defending disjointed individual resistors and encourage them to join up into an organized mass movement. Of murder ninjas.
One of the criminally underrepresented aspects of Bloodlines is the themes of distrust and confusion. When Altair first comes to Cyprus, Alexander first seems like he’s going to be a Templar and attack Altair, until the Assassin reveals who he is. Later on, when Altair goes to Kyrenia, he meets Markos, and once again isn’t sure whether or not he’s a Templar until the man assures him that he just absolutely hates those jackoffs.
It’s so minor a thing that I’m not even sure it’s intentional or coincidental, but the third man that Altair meets, who he doesn’t actually suspect, is an actual traitor. Passing himself off as the head of the resistance, Barnabas, the traitor sends Altair off to murder a man named Jonas who is supposedly a traitor himself, and Altair just… does it. He beats the crap out of Jonas to interrogate him, learns about the bounty on his head, and kills Jonas.
This random wanton murder turns out to have been a bad idea. Riots break out because of Jonas’ death, and Altair realizes that he was tricked by the real traitor. Later, when sneaking through Buffavento castle, Altair watches Bouchard tell Shalim to send a burlap sack to Alexander, the Resistance contact in Limassol. Altair is suspicious, and once he goes back to Limassol, he accuses Alexander of being a spy for the Templars, and gets accused of being a spy in turn. The burlap sack, it turns out, was the head of the real Barnabas, and Alexander thought it was Altair’s doing.
The Bull’s twins could also be said to be part of this theme of uncertainty, if I really want to stretch it, which I really do. Altair thinks he’s tailing Shalim, but it… turns out not to be. That’s really all there is to it, it’s barely even there. I’m just noting it.
Twice a mysterious Templar assassin kills someone, once a monk that Altair was going to ask about Shalim, and the second time he murders Alexander, framing Altair for the murder and revealing that he was Barnabas the whole time. It would have been more interesting a reveal if there was actually some kind of set up for it, or if he’d been in the game as the mysterious figure more than once before this point.
And while the mysterious figure, the fake Barnabas, could have been explored more, well, the game was coming to a close, so Maria just stabs him in the back.
The whole thing seems like a cool idea but in the end it’s another big shrug.
Throughout the game, Altair writes in his journal about the Apple, and its effects. He says that if he can’t find a way to use it for the good of humanity, he’ll destroy it. The existence of the Apple is used at one point to keep Maria in line, when Altair points out that if she kills him, she’ll never find out where it’s hidden, and the Apple will curry more favour with the Templars than his head.
The game constantly reminds the audience that Altair has the Apple of Eden that he took from his master. And at the climax of the game, when the fake Barnabas has framed Altair for the death of Alexander and a mob is about to kill him, Altair finally pulls out the Apple and uses it to turn away the crowd, and send them home to regroup and finally take back their country from the Templars (something that we never actually see happen).
The use (or disuse) of the Apple is never really treated as something Altair wouldn’t want to do. At best there is arguing with Maria about whether or not the Templars mean well with the artifact (and whether it should be in Altair’s hands either, if its so dangerous).
Maria is the entire reason I decided to give the game a chance. I wanted to experience her story, to see what she was like when actually treated as a character. I was only mostly disappointed.
Maria is the first boss of the game, and after that she becomes Altair’s prisoner until she manages to escape. She spends most of the game with her wrists bound, or locked up somewhere, either where Altair put her or somewhere else. She doesn’t exactly have much agency, but neither do any of the other side characters.
Much like Altair, her story has a lot to do with betrayal and trust. Her order has betrayed her, and even the men at the beginning of the game who seem to ostensibly work for her don’t really seem to want to deal with her. After de Sable’s death, she’s on the outs, and everyone thinks she’s a traitor. Meanwhile, a lot of her interactions with Altair involve the Assassin trying to actually make her betray the order.
His conversations with her are relatively short, and most of it amounts to saying “pls join me” and she scoffs a lot and tries to run away, or just mopes in a cage. He tries to get her to understand that regardless of what Robert de Sable told her, he wanted conquest and to strip people of their free will. It’s only in getting away from Altair and trying to get back in with the Templars that she realizes that he’s right, although she still doesn’t entirely trust him, either, at least not until he saves her after she gets her ass kicked by Bouchard.
In the end, though, its their conversation at the end of the game that really sells their relationship to me. The two of them were both betrayed by men they cared about, and that betrayal shook them and makes them question their goals and motivations in life. They have quite a bit in common in that regard.
It’s not exactly detailed, and her character still feels a little flat, but with this game, I can at least understand why they eventually wed and have two children and live happily with each other for like 50 years.
This isn’t really a review, but I’m going to be up front with you, unless you still own your old PSP or get one at a garage sale, it really isn’t worth it to play this game. It’s boring and uninteresting and says nothing really all that new about the world.
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You know what you should do, though?
Grab Assassin’s Creed: the Secret Crusade from your local library. I listened to the audiobook of it and while I probably never would have gotten far if I tried to read it, if you’re okay with quickly paced YA fiction based on video games, well, its decent enough.
Secret Crusade is the “untold story” of Altair’s life based on the flashback scenes from Revelations. Instead of a frame story around Desmond, Secret Crusade is Niccolo Polo recounting the story that Altair told him to his brother Maffeo as the two stay at the castle of Masyaf. It tells the story of the first game, Bloodlines, and many of the events that get shown in Revelations, interspersed with scenes from Altair’s early life.
The book was surprisingly good for something I grabbed on a whim to listen to while I was out helping my mom do some shopping for a Christmas party. So good in fact that I’ve already started listening to the first of Oliver Bowden’s novelizations, which I’ll talk about more during Assassin’s Screed II.
Remember all those little things that annoyed me? A lot of them get fixed. We can hear Altair’s thoughts, and even early on he feels remorse for fucking up, even if he hasn’t let go of his cockiness. He suspects that Al Mualim isn’t telling him everything, but still trusts him. The other assassination targets come up before their names are called, making it feel like they exist in the world and not just a single chapter of the game. Altair feels much less like a bumbling dumbass when we can hear what he thinks of things, and it really levels out his character.
The book practically breezes through the plot of the original game, but it also gives it a sense of time and scale. The rides back and forth to Masyaf take days. Altair has time to think about things. His approaches and kills are perfect, so no dialogue is missed or goes unheard. Even characters like Tamir and Talal get more characterization, like the way that Talal begs for mercy. The only thing I hate is that Abul Noqoud is fatter, grosser, and less queer, which makes him less sympathetic. There’s no mention of the way he caresses or looks at his bodyguards, and the line where Altair tells him their words can no longer hurt him is missing even though all the other white room dialogue is kept intact. Its conspicuous, but I tried not to let it bother me too much.
The plot to Bloodlines is covered in the book as well, and while it does little to fix the game’s timescale, it still manages to flesh things out. Altair has a meal with Maria. There are more resistance members mentioned, since they don’t have to be modeled.
Not only does Maria get a meal, she also gets a backstory. A young tomboy back in England, she married a boring man because of her parents and he eventually had the marriage annulled and she disgraced her parents so bad that she had to go to the Holy Land to get away. She met de Sable, became his apprentice, and all of it really helps to make her eventual turn away from the Templars even more convincing. She doesn’t get a ton more personality, but she does get some, and it was greatly appreciated.
The Barnabas plot is fleshed out as well. Altair still goes and commits a murder for him, even though he’s even more suspicious right off the bat, but the novelization still makes Altair come off as a little less clueless. The false Barnabas’ murder of a priest is cut, so he just shows up having murdered Alexander as a masked killer, but the head of the real Barnabas is used to make Altair out to be the murderer. The themes of betrayal and trust are scattered throughout, and came back later in Altair’s life when he has a moment of doubt and believes that maybe Malik really did kill his son, only for the now far older Maria to tell her husband not to have a mind so open that birds shit in it.
The Apple of Eden also plays a much bigger role in the book’s treatment of the Bloodlines plot, with Bowden’s narration never letting you forget about it, and never letting you forget that it tempts Altair.
“It is temptation,” Al Mualim said, and through the story we’re made to understand just what that is. We see how the temptation of the Apple led Al Mualim to betray his adopted son, and his Creed. We see when Altair used it how it makes him feel. We see when Abbas uses it how it made him feel. It’s not just treated as a thing that kind controls people, it’s treated as the embodiment of “power corrupts”.
There’s an actual reason that’s given for why Altair doesn’t just solve his problems with the Apple. We can always assume that Altair won’t mind control people because he’s a good guy, but it’s different to see the internal conflict, and to see when he breaks down and what it does to him, and those around him.
I can’t comment on how well the scenes from Revelations are depicted in the book versus the game, but something tells me I’ll come back to the book and compare it favourably to the actual game’s scenes. That’s kind of rare for a novelization. I’m a big fan of this franchise and it’s setting in spite of a lot of the corporate bullshit, but Secret Crusade makes me wish even harder that there was a different, and better, version of these games out there. I’ve already had to pull myself away from Assassin’s Creed Renaissance because I still haven’t even started the second game, but, man, it’s actually really good. I look forward to listening to more of these books, even though the narrator makes every character either gravely or whiny. Go read them, they’ll probably be quick pop corn reads, but if you like these games for their stories, you won’t be disappointed.
That’s the end of that. Thanks for reading my retrospective on a video game that no one actually played in the first place. If you liked it, please throw me a few dollars on Cash.me, or even become my Patron.
